Galactic cannibalism in action, one drop at a time

Recent images from the Hubble Space Telescope show what may be an amazing manifestation of galactic cannibalism in action:

Image credit: http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2014-26-a-web_print.jpg

We saw earlier this week that interacting galaxies will often have streams of gas and stars between them, but this example shows a delicate series of "super star clusters" in a corkscrew pattern evenly spaced 3000 light years apart. "We have two monsters playing tug-of-war with a necklace," says Grant Tremblay of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, "and its ultimate fate is an interesting question in the context of the formation of stellar superclusters and the merger-driven growth of a galaxy's stellar component."